In a newly released Young Adult Fiction novel, In the Company of Wolves a boy named Jaime moves from New York to a small town outside of Albuquerque. His father just died in the Vietnam war, and his mother sends him to live with his father’s family to get away from the hustle and bustle of the world. Alongside his uncle he gets acquainted with desert life, including learning how to ride a horse, and a close encounter with a special wolf named Graybeard.
KUNM spoke with author Antonio Farias about his debut novel after a 40-year career of creative writing in an academic setting.
FARIAS: I grew up reading, you know, the great boom masters, right? García Marquez, you know, Carlos Fuentes, big narratives, grand epics. And I wrote a novel in that, in that sort of genre, and it's still in a drawer someplace. It's one of those, they call it ‘trunk novels’. But in this MFA, two faculty members, Mary Otis and Mary Yukari Waters both challenged me to write in the first person, and I hated writing in the first person, and I didn't want to write in that style, because it was like, “No, I don't want this to be a therapy session for me and it's not about me.”It's like, I want to create a different world. And one of the things that I learned early on, and I still practice, is that in order for people to grow, they need to be pushed out of their comfort zone, otherwise, you just keep doing the same thing over and over again and complaining about why the world doesn't change. And that's where Jaime was born. I wrote a short story. I was like, “fine, I was out of my comfort zone, and Jaime came to life.” And that scene, that first chapter in the book, is that story that I wrote. Then when I had time, I was able to flush it out into a full novel.
KUNM: Your main character, Jaime, is in a very vulnerable part of his life. He just lost his dad, he's moving, he's young. What do you hope boys his age that read your novel can learn for themselves?
FARIAS: To be curious about the world, I would say would be the number one thing. And again, young people in general are just super curious creatures, and yet we get our curiosity stymied, especially now, by all of the bombardment that we have and the algorithms that draw us into things like video games. And it's like, I grew up playing Atari video games, right? So I'm not anti-video games, but there wasn't the pervasiveness, and there wasn't the isolation, like I played video games, and then, you know, Mike would knock on the door really loud, and then I would run out the door, and then we would be gone, this little gang of boys running through the streets of New York City, doing a lot of mischief, right, but goofing around, playing with each other, right, having fights, and then, like, making up 10 minutes later, there was a world where that happened naturally. And what I want young boys, or parents and loved ones that raise young boys, is to develop that level of curiosity for boys, put them in situations where they can actually sort of look at the world differently, get them out of their comfort zones. And to me, nature has always served in that role, especially in young people, it makes them ask questions, terrifying questions, like, “who am I?, why am I here?, why am I hurting?,” and then in the silence, you actually find meaning, and you find it in awestruck things. For Jaime, it's the wolves and the horse, right? It's things that don't speak back to us in cognitive sort of ways.
KUNM: How long have you been working on this piece?
FARIAS: Since 2013 and it's been like on and off. You know, if somebody were to ask, what are my writing habits? Oh, they're horrific. Again, it's taken me, what 12 years to finish and get this book published. The bulk of the novel was written during the [COVID-19] pandemic. I picked it up again, and my whole thing was, “well, if the world's gonna end then I at least want to write one, like mediocre novel before I die.” So that was really the impetus to get that done. And then I put it away, and then I re-pulled it out. And, you know, I have a fantastic wife who, like, after a certain point, just calls me out on my soft weakness of making excuses. And she's like, “just do it!” So about two years ago, I finished it and I submitted it to Arte Publico, because again, I believe Arte Publico and when I was a young student I would read all these article writers, because they were the only ones writing or publishing Latino literature. Latino literature is now hot, it wasn't back then, but they were the ones that were doing it. So in many ways, it's like I'm in the hall of heroes, and I don't know how the hell I snuck in, but somehow they haven't thrown me out yet.
